自深深处（三）

I will begin by telling you that I blame myself terribly.

As I sit here in this dark cell in convict clothes, a disgraced and ruined man, I blame myself.

From the very first there was too wide a gap between us.

You had been idle at your school, worse than idle at your university.

You admired my work when it was finished: you enjoyed the brilliant successes of my first nights, and the brilliant banquets that followed them: you were proud, and quite naturally so, of being the intimate friend of an artist so distinguished: but you could not understand the conditions requisite for the production of artistic work.

I am not speaking in phrases of rhetorical exaggeration but in terms of absolute truth to actual fact when I remind you that during the whole time we were together I never wrote one single line.

Whether at Torquay, Goring, London, Florence or elsewhere, my life, as long as you were by my side, was entirely sterile and uncreative. And with but few intervals you were, I regret to say, by my side always.